Field- and Carrier-facilitated Nonlinear Optical Phenomena in Nanophotonics

Abstract

Engineered photonic nanostructures offer the exciting potential to create customized optical media with tailored nonlinear effects, which are essential to the active control of light and the generation of new spectral components. Leveraging the electrical and optical functions simultaneously supported in nanophotonic systems, we demonstrate dynamically controllable light-matter interactions for nonlinear optical generation and signal processing. In particular, we harness the transient disruption of the structural symmetry for second-order and chiroptical processes, and facilitate the hot-carrier-induced perturbation of the dielectric permittivity for all-optical control of light. Such effects are exploited in various nanophotonic platforms, including plasmonic structures, dielectric metasurfaces, and two-dimensional crystals.

Bio

Wenshan Cai is a professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a joint appointment in Materials Science and Engineering, at Georgia Tech. He received his B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua University in 2000 and 2002, respectively, and his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2008. His research is focused on nanophotonic materials and devices, in which he has made major impacts on the field of plasmonics and metamaterials. Dr. Cai has published ~100 journal articles, which in total have been cited about 30,000 times. He authored the book, Optical Metamaterials: Fundamentals and Applications, which is used as a textbook or a major reference around the world. He is a Fellow of SPIE and Optica.